The Wormhole Solution: New Research Offers Fresh Insights into the Universe’s Greatest Mystery

The universe is accelerating. Every galaxy beyond our local group is rushing away from us, and the farther away it is, the faster it recedes. Something is pushing space apart — and physicists do not know what it is.

The leading placeholder is called dark energy, a name that essentially means “we do not know.” It accounts for roughly 68% of the total energy of the observable universe, yet it has never been directly detected.

Now a study in the journal Physical Review D proposes a radical candidate: microscopic wormholes, ceaselessly born and destroyed in the quantum vacuum of space.

If correct, it would be one of the most consequential ideas in the history of cosmology — connecting the largest structures in the universe to the smallest scales of quantum gravity.

What Is Dark Energy, and Why Is It a Problem?

When Einstein formulated general relativity in 1915, he added a term called the cosmological constant — a built-in repulsive energy of space — to keep the universe static, which he then believed it was.

When Edwin Hubble showed in 1929 that galaxies were receding in every direction, Einstein dropped the term, reportedly calling it his greatest blunder.

Then, in 1998, two independent teams studying distant Type Ia supernovae discovered that the expansion is not merely continuing but accelerating. The cosmological constant was brought back from the dead.

Renamed dark energy, it became the most economical explanation for what the observations demanded. But a deep problem lurked beneath it.

When physicists calculate the vacuum energy from quantum field theory, they get a value about 10¹²⁰ times larger than what is observed — the largest gap between theory and experiment in the history of science.

This is the cosmological constant problem. Alternatives such as quintessence and modified gravity have been proposed over the years. The wormhole model is among the most recent and most intriguing. The force it seeks to explain is covered in our article on dark energy, the invisible force.

What Is a Wormhole?

A wormhole — formally an Einstein-Rosen bridge — is a hypothetical structure in spacetime connecting two separate regions through a shortcut that bypasses ordinary geometry.

Wormholes emerge naturally from the mathematics of general relativity. Einstein and Nathan Rosen first described them in 1935, though they noted such structures would be unstable and collapse before anything could pass through.

The traversable wormholes of science fiction — stable tunnels a spaceship could cross — require exotic matter with negative energy density to hold them open. No such material has ever been observed.

But the wormholes in this new proposal are not those grand structures. They are subatomic — vanishingly small fluctuations at the Planck scale, around 10⁻³⁵ metres, the smallest meaningful length in physics.

At that scale, spacetime itself is thought to foam and bubble with transient geometric structures. The physicist John Wheeler named this idea “quantum foam” in the 1950s.

What the new research adds is a precise calculation of how often these wormholes form and vanish — and a proposal that the process contributes measurably to the energy of the vacuum.

The New Research: Wormholes as Dark Energy

The study, led by Stylianos Tsilioukas of the University of Thessaly with Emmanuel Saridakis and Charalampos Tzerefos, uses an approach called Euclidean quantum gravity to model wormhole creation in the vacuum.

In ordinary quantum theory, virtual particles constantly appear and disappear, borrowing existence from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Their fluctuations contribute to the vacuum energy of space.

The wormhole model extends this idea to fluctuations not just in particle fields but in the geometry of spacetime itself — quantum gravitational effects that produce transient wormhole structures.

A crucial technical detail is that the effect does not arise from Einstein’s equations alone. It appears only when a higher-order term, called the Gauss-Bonnet term, is included in the gravitational action.

With that term, the continuous birth and death of microscopic wormholes changes the topology of spacetime and induces an effective cosmological constant — one that behaves, on large scales, like dark energy.

The numbers are staggering. The authors estimate that around ten billion wormholes forming per cubic centimetre of space every second would supply enough energy to drive the observed acceleration.

Most importantly, this dark energy is not constant. Because the wormhole density changes as the universe expands, the model produces a dynamic dark energy rather than a fixed cosmological constant.

Why This Differs From Other Quantum Effects

The researchers are careful to distinguish their idea from other vacuum phenomena that might seem similar.

Hawking radiation — the slow evaporation of black holes — and the Schwinger effect — pair creation in a strong electric field — both involve quantum fields operating on a fixed spacetime background.

The wormhole mechanism is fundamentally different. It requires quantum effects in gravity itself, where the geometry of spacetime must be treated quantum mechanically, not as a fixed stage.

This places the proposal firmly in the domain of quantum gravity — the not-yet-completed theory that would unify general relativity with quantum mechanics.

The team used Euclidean quantum gravity, a technique in which time is treated as an imaginary number, converting the problem into a more tractable geometric form.

This method has been productive since the 1970s, most famously in the no-boundary proposal for the universe’s origin — an idea explored in our article on the origin of the universe from nothing.

How Well Does the Model Fit the Data?

The team compared their model against current observations and found it fits better than the standard Lambda-CDM model, which treats dark energy as a fixed constant.

The key advantage is the model’s dynamic dark energy. Recent data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, hints that the expansion history may not fit a perfectly constant dark energy.

DESI mapped the positions of tens of millions of galaxies, and its results — combined with the cosmic microwave background and supernovae — create a mild but persistent tension within the standard model.

A time-varying dark energy eases that tension in a physically motivated way, and the wormhole model naturally produces exactly this behaviour. This connects to the wider Hubble tension in cosmology.

This does not mean the model is confirmed. Fitting existing data better than a rival is necessary but not sufficient. What is needed is a distinctive prediction that future observations can test.

The Challenge: Can It Be Tested?

This is where the proposal faces its most serious limitation. For now, the theory cannot be tested with existing instruments.

The wormholes are far too small to observe directly, and their collective effect is currently hard to distinguish from other dynamic dark energy models using today’s surveys.

The researchers acknowledge this openly and frame it as a target for future work. The next generation of surveys is designed for exactly this kind of question.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, now operational, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which began its main survey in 2025, will map cosmic structure with unprecedented precision.

If the model’s specific predictions for how dark energy evolves match what these observatories see, it would be a powerful sign that quantum gravity leaves a real imprint on the largest scales of the cosmos.

Connecting the Very Small to the Very Large

Beyond cosmology, the proposal carries a deeper significance. It is one of the few concrete ideas for how quantum gravitational effects might leave observable traces at cosmic scales.

These effects operate roughly twenty orders of magnitude smaller than an atomic nucleus, yet the model suggests they could shape the expansion of the entire universe.

Bridging the very small and the very large is a central goal of physics. General relativity and quantum mechanics, the two pillars of modern science, remain incompatible in their current forms.

The wormhole idea hints that the cosmological constant problem might be resolved by quantum gravitational effects left out of the standard calculation — helping explain why observed dark energy is so small.

Quantum entanglement may be connected too. The ER=EPR conjecture, proposed by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind in 2013, suggests entangled particles are linked by microscopic wormholes.

If correct, entanglement and spacetime geometry would be two faces of the same phenomenon. For a full introduction, see our article on quantum entanglement, the mystery at the heart of quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman famously said that anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics does not. The wormhole proposal is a reminder that the deepest quantum mysteries may be written across the sky, not confined to the laboratory. His story is told in our article on Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize physicist.

What Comes Next

The wormhole dark energy proposal is a young idea in a fast-moving field. Its authors have made a clear, mathematically rigorous prediction that is now in the queue to be tested.

The Euclid mission is already returning data. The Rubin Observatory began its decade-long survey of the southern sky in 2025. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due late this decade, will add further precision.

Together, these instruments will assemble the most detailed picture ever made of how the universe’s expansion has evolved — and whether dark energy is constant or changing.

If the data match the wormhole model, it will open a new chapter: one in which quantum gravity is no longer only a theoretical aspiration but an observationally confirmed part of cosmic evolution.

If it does not, the idea will join the long list of elegant proposals that nature declined to adopt — and the search for dark energy’s true identity will go on.

Why This Matters

Dark energy is the single largest component of the universe and its deepest mystery. Any credible new idea about its nature is worth taking seriously.

What makes the wormhole proposal compelling is not that it is proven — it is not — but that it is testable in principle, and that it ties dark energy to quantum gravity in a specific, calculable way.

It is a reminder that the boundary between the quantum and the cosmic may be far thinner than it appears — and that the answer to the universe’s greatest mystery might lie at its very smallest scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Tsilioukas, S. A., Saridakis, E. N. & Tzerefos, C. (2024). “Dark energy from topology change induced by microscopic Gauss-Bonnet wormholes.” Physical Review D, 109, 084010 (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.109.084010). Preprint: arXiv:2312.07486.
• Einstein, A. & Rosen, N. (1935). “The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity.” Physical Review, 48, 73 (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRev.48.73).
• Riess, A. G., et al. (1998). “Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe.” The Astronomical Journal, 116, 1009 (DOI: 10.1086/300499).
• Perlmutter, S., et al. (1999). “Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae.” The Astrophysical Journal, 517, 565 (DOI: 10.1086/307221).
• Maldacena, J. & Susskind, L. (2013). “Cool horizons for entangled black holes.” Fortschritte der Physik, 61, 781 (DOI: 10.1002/prop.201300020).
• Hartle, J. B. & Hawking, S. W. (1983). “Wave function of the Universe.” Physical Review D, 28, 2960 (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.28.2960).
• DESI — Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument.
• ESA — Euclid Mission.